The Two Mountains

One of the reasons many ICs switch to management is to be more strategic, more influential, and more impactful. Unfortunately, becoming a manager doesn’t christened you with strategic authority. New managers are often so overwhelmed with new responsibilities, situations, and relationships that thinking strategically seems out of reach. You’re reactive rather than proactive.

How do you grow as a manager, build influence, and be more strategic? It comes from climbing two mountains.

The First Mountain

The first mountain you climb as a manager is learning how to support your team and be responsible for their success. A new manager is like a new parent learning to put the needs of others above their own, helping the kids avoid bumping their heads on everything. In the first few years of managing, you’ll learn how to be a better communicator, set clear expectations, and hold people accountable.

There’s no shortcut to the top of the first mountain. There is only one long, winding path: time in the role, having new experiences, and building your instincts. You’ll go through performance reviews, support an under-performer, help people through promotions, help others transfer teams, succeed and fail at giving recognition, and participate in great and terrible product reviews. Collect each experience as part of your learning process.

Don’t stress about the strategic chess you think you should be playing. Being comfortable as a manager won’t come tomorrow, in a half, or even in a year. It will come over several years as you try different approaches, encounter new situations, and most importantly, make mistakes, an inevitable consequence of doing something new.

The Valley

There’s no way to prepare new managers for how time consuming and stressful management is. This is the valley. Between annual planning, performance reviews, conflicting meetings, one on ones, and last-minute product reviews, you’re always dealing with several simultaneous demands. A never-ending barrage of the next thing and more meetings and meetings you think you should have been in. “If I only had more time,” you’ll sigh at your fully booked calendar. “Once we get through this bit of chaos, I can work on those big-picture projects,” you’ll tell your manager every week.

You escape the valley through self-awareness. First, recognize that you’re in the valley. Then, realize that what worked before might not work any more.

How are you holding yourself back? Have you actually internalized the feedback you received? Do you not have enough time, or is your attention on the wrong things? Are you taking on too much work? Are you looking at problems in the right way?

The Second Mountain

The second mountain you climb as a manager is driving important issues in the organization with humility. This means learning how to work at the right altitude (that’s a mountain pun), see the big picture, make important decisions, and help the move the business forward.

The path to the top of the second mountain is counterintuitive. Rather than searching for more responsibilities and impact, you should focus on your strengths, simplicity, and communication skills.

As you take on bigger responsibilities and support more teams, you need ever-simpler ways to focus on the most important issues. Find the primary themes you need to remember, at the right altitude, that most other decisions fold into. You’ll repeat these over and over to the team as you help them understand why those concepts are critical. When you write about a reorg or a plan, you’ll talk about how it contributes to those primary themes.

As you become a more senior manager, your strengths and responsibilities will overlap with your peers as you gain the product, design, and technical skills needed to build great products. You’ll feel pressured to develop product management and engineering leadership skills if you’re in Design, or vice versa. However, you shouldn’t become more like your peers, but lean into your unique strengths and experiences. Look for the decisions affecting your themes and area of expertise (e.g. if you’re in Design, be relentlessly focused on solving user needs), because that’s where you’ll add the most value. If you can trace a technical decision to your theme, you’ll know that’s something to work with the engineering team on. The same is true for business decisions, data, research, or marketing. If you can’t trace it, or can trust a good decision will be made without you, you can let it go. It may not need you or it may be at the wrong altitude.

The climb up the second mountain requires humility. I’m often struck by the candor of leaders in small group discussions, and I think it would surprise many ICs and new managers. For example, in a meeting of VPs at Facebook I once attended, in response to a tough question, a VP replied, “Yes, that is a challenge I’m dealing with. I would value feedback on how to solve that.” Openly and honestly discussing the problems you’re facing with emotional detachment gives room for others to contribute to solving hard problems with you.

There’s more to this model, the paths and tools that help you climb these mountains, but knowing the map is a helpful way to chart your own growth. I’m confident that if you are struggling through some of these areas, and brought this to another leader, they could build on this with you.